Jim Dixon has accidentally fallen into a job at one of Britain's new red brick universities. A moderately successful future in the History Department beckons. As long as Jim can survive a madrigal-singing weekend at Professor Welch's, deliver a lecture on 'Merrie England' and resist Christine, the hopelessly desirable girlfriend of Welch's awful son Bertrand.
Editorial Reviews
"A brilliantly and preposterously funny book." --Guardian
"A classic comic novel, a seminal campus novel, and a novel which seized and expressed the mood of those who came of age in the 1950s. But there is more to it than that...Its university setting functions primarily as the epitome of a stuffy, provincial bourgeois world into which the hero is promoted by education, and against whose values and codes he rebels, at first inwardly and at last outwardly." --David Lodge
"Dixon makes little dents in the smug fabric of hypocritical, humbugging, class bound British society...Amis caught the mood of post-war restiveness in a book which, though socially significant, was, and still is, extremely funny." --Anthony Burgess
"A flawless comic novel ... I loved it then, as I do now. It has always made me laugh out loud." --Helen Dunmore, The Times
About the Author
Kingsley Amis (1922-1995), born in London, wrote poetry, criticism, and short stories, but is best remembered as the novelist whose works offered a comic deconstruction of post-war Britain. Amis explored his disillusionment with British society in novels such as Lucky Jim (1954) and That Uncertain Feeling (1955); his other works include The Green Man (1970) Stanley and the Women (1984), and The Old Devils (1986) which won the Booker Prize.
Introduction by David Lodge, the author of twelve novels and a novella, including the Booker Prize finalists Small World and Nice Work. He is also the author of many works of literary criticism, including The Art of Fiction and Consciousness and the Novel.
![Lucky Per (1904) has long been revered in its homeland as "the great Danish novel." Henrik Pontoppidan was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1917 and hailed by Thomas Mann as "a full-blooded storyteller." His masterpiece is an epic portrayal of social and cultural change that feels surprisingly modern more than a century after its writing.
Pontoppidan provides a panoramic view of the contradictions of the modernizing world through the portrait of a single driven and beleaguered soul. Per Sidenius, unhappy son of an austere clergyman, rejects his faith and flees the Danish countryside for the capital city . Gifted and ambitious, he arrives in Copenhagen believing "you had to hunt down luck as if it were a wild creature, a crooked-fanged beast...[and] capture and bind it." Per's obsession is a grandiose engineering scheme that he believes will reshape both Denmark's landscape and its minor position in the world. While working relentlessly to achieve this inflated vision of personal and national destiny, he pursues the fiercely independent heiress Jakobe Salomon, the most appealing character in the book and one of the greatest Jewish heroines in European literature. Though Per's ambitions come to grief along the way at its heart his story turns on his belated understanding of the true relationship between "luck" and "happiness" (the Danish word in the title contains both meanings). In its expansive richness and its humane depths, Lucky Per is a triumph of world literature.
Translated from the Danish by Naomi Lebowitz
Introduction by Garth Risk Hallberg](https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-ezptpblrxu/images/stencil/500x659/products/1227/1968/LuckyPer__35307.1668716752.jpg?c=2 "Lucky Per (1904) has long been revered in its homeland as \"the great Danish novel.\" Henrik Pontoppidan was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1917 and hailed by Thomas Mann as \"a full-blooded storyteller.\" His masterpiece is an epic portrayal of social and cultural change that feels surprisingly modern more than a century after its writing.
Pontoppidan provides a panoramic view of the contradictions of the modernizing world through the portrait of a single driven and beleaguered soul. Per Sidenius, unhappy son of an austere clergyman, rejects his faith and flees the Danish countryside for the capital city . Gifted and ambitious, he arrives in Copenhagen believing \"you had to hunt down luck as if it were a wild creature, a crooked-fanged beast...[and] capture and bind it.\" Per's obsession is a grandiose engineering scheme that he believes will reshape both Denmark's landscape and its minor position in the world. While working relentlessly to achieve this inflated vision of personal and national destiny, he pursues the fiercely independent heiress Jakobe Salomon, the most appealing character in the book and one of the greatest Jewish heroines in European literature. Though Per's ambitions come to grief along the way at its heart his story turns on his belated understanding of the true relationship between \"luck\" and \"happiness\" (the Danish word in the title contains both meanings). In its expansive richness and its humane depths, Lucky Per is a triumph of world literature.
Translated from the Danish by Naomi Lebowitz
Introduction by Garth Risk Hallberg")
